5 ms·

hardly fringe -- it's straight out of the unix wars historical playbook. Every unix vendor tried to make their own conflicting systems in order to promote lock

hardly fringe -- it's straight out of the unix wars historical playbook. Every unix vendor tried to make their own conflicting systems in order to promote lock-in. Solaris, AIX, DG/UX, SCO, everyone, all the time. That it's taken so long in the Linux space is pretty amazing, but of course that it's happening is super depressing.

marcosdumay 10y ago
That requires the systems to be proprietary, and, well, conflicting. Systemd isn't proprietary, and with everybody's adoption it's now universal, not conflicting. I'm not sure where this tendency of Red Had for taking over the ecosystem comes from. The only rational basis for it I can think of is they wanting Linux to stay complex, so they can sell support. But it's way more likely it comes simply by them hiring a big number of developers, and not having enough in-house problems to solve - after that they must lead, not follow (for marketing reasons), so they must push their solution onto everybody.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  Conway's law Organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations It could be that they both benefit from building complex systems and believe honestly that such systems are the optimal solution from their own perspective. This requires no bad faith or conspiracy theories. Its simultaneously possible that such a complex solution is sub optimal for other parties. They are under no obligation to build a solution that is best for other parties and others are under no obligation to adopt or like such solutions. Its entirely possible for two parties to disagree without either being evil.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    In regards to this, i ran into a blog posting over at blogs.gnome.org, about Fedora's workstation project. That alone should raise some red flags about mixing roles. But then i start reading and seeing the guy name others from seemingly unrelated projects, thanking them for their efforts. But lo and behold, once i start running the bloggers name, and the names he mentions, they all come up as Red Hat employees.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  "That requires the systems to be proprietary, and, well, conflicting." No it doesn't. Different OSS projects already compete with each other in many details of design and implementation. They try to win over users or mindshare instead of dollars. Some with financial backing also have dollars in mind. Even lock-in is approximated by things that many apps depend on but are too big to change without risking a break.
  - zanny 10y ago
    But this kind of competition, or even intent behind a product, is thus not unethical or harmful to the users. Let systemd try to take over whatever it wants. It is still LGPL licensed, so I can do whatever I want with it as well. Those writing it can do whatever they want - nobody has forced any distro to adopt systemd bseides Red Hat themselves, insofar as it was their project principally so of course their own distro used it. Arch, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu... all game to use it under consensus. I personally think there is no better outcome than well engineered and linked software seeing uniform adoption to let the ecosystem move on to bigger problems. The degree to which systemd's pervasiveness has enabled the vast simplification and feature richness of so many disparate aspects of development on the platform only reinforces that belief - the ease of writing and shipping service, socket, requires, triggers, timer, mount, etc files. The ubiquitous availability of a session dbus. udev pervasiveness, cgroups already being there and setup, there is so much feature richness systemd gives everyone up the stack to claim shell scripts and grit were better is to say you should never stop reinventing the wheel to build the cart until the wheel is cast from solid gold.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  I'm not sure where this tendency of Red Had for taking over the ecosystem comes from. Because they're willing to fund the work.
- msbarnett 10y ago
  > Systemd isn't proprietary, and with everybody's adoption it's now universal, not conflicting. Within Linux. Systemd is explicitly anti-portability across Unixes, and encourages dependencies on it that make life increasingly hard for the BSDs, OS X, etc. So, yeah, if you zoom out a little from Linux, systemd fits right in with the UNIX wars.
  - Aloha 10y ago
    Linux won the UNIX wars, by bringing an end to them - yes BSD exists - but in both mindshare, and marketshare Linux beat the rest of them out. Beyond that, sysv was never relevant for BSD - and I don't think many Linux distros went with rc.d either. So in the end, because of compatibility shims on both sites - and that our software build systems have evolved to support multiple init systems, its largely a moot point.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  No, it does not need to be proprietary. Instead one need to have control over the commit rights of core repositories. As for conflicting: i think you have missed server years of conflict, never mind that you can only ever have one process as pid1 on a unix setup. And if something like your session tracker depends on pid1 being systemd, you get conflict.

marcosdumay 10y ago

That requires the systems to be proprietary, and, well, conflicting. Systemd isn't proprietary, and with everybody's adoption it's now universal, not conflicting. I'm not sure where this tendency of Red Had for taking over the ecosystem comes from. The only rational basis for it I can think of is they wanting Linux to stay complex, so they can sell support. But it's way more likely it comes simply by them hiring a big number of developers, and not having enough in-house problems to solve - after that they must lead, not follow (for marketing reasons), so they must push their solution onto everybody.

michaelmrose 10y ago
Conway's law Organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations It could be that they both benefit from building complex systems and believe honestly that such systems are the optimal solution from their own perspective. This requires no bad faith or conspiracy theories. Its simultaneously possible that such a complex solution is sub optimal for other parties. They are under no obligation to build a solution that is best for other parties and others are under no obligation to adopt or like such solutions. Its entirely possible for two parties to disagree without either being evil.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  In regards to this, i ran into a blog posting over at blogs.gnome.org, about Fedora's workstation project. That alone should raise some red flags about mixing roles. But then i start reading and seeing the guy name others from seemingly unrelated projects, thanking them for their efforts. But lo and behold, once i start running the bloggers name, and the names he mentions, they all come up as Red Hat employees.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
"That requires the systems to be proprietary, and, well, conflicting." No it doesn't. Different OSS projects already compete with each other in many details of design and implementation. They try to win over users or mindshare instead of dollars. Some with financial backing also have dollars in mind. Even lock-in is approximated by things that many apps depend on but are too big to change without risking a break.
- zanny 10y ago
  But this kind of competition, or even intent behind a product, is thus not unethical or harmful to the users. Let systemd try to take over whatever it wants. It is still LGPL licensed, so I can do whatever I want with it as well. Those writing it can do whatever they want - nobody has forced any distro to adopt systemd bseides Red Hat themselves, insofar as it was their project principally so of course their own distro used it. Arch, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu... all game to use it under consensus. I personally think there is no better outcome than well engineered and linked software seeing uniform adoption to let the ecosystem move on to bigger problems. The degree to which systemd's pervasiveness has enabled the vast simplification and feature richness of so many disparate aspects of development on the platform only reinforces that belief - the ease of writing and shipping service, socket, requires, triggers, timer, mount, etc files. The ubiquitous availability of a session dbus. udev pervasiveness, cgroups already being there and setup, there is so much feature richness systemd gives everyone up the stack to claim shell scripts and grit were better is to say you should never stop reinventing the wheel to build the cart until the wheel is cast from solid gold.
ktRolster 10y ago
I'm not sure where this tendency of Red Had for taking over the ecosystem comes from. Because they're willing to fund the work.
msbarnett 10y ago
> Systemd isn't proprietary, and with everybody's adoption it's now universal, not conflicting. Within Linux. Systemd is explicitly anti-portability across Unixes, and encourages dependencies on it that make life increasingly hard for the BSDs, OS X, etc. So, yeah, if you zoom out a little from Linux, systemd fits right in with the UNIX wars.
- Aloha 10y ago
  Linux won the UNIX wars, by bringing an end to them - yes BSD exists - but in both mindshare, and marketshare Linux beat the rest of them out. Beyond that, sysv was never relevant for BSD - and I don't think many Linux distros went with rc.d either. So in the end, because of compatibility shims on both sites - and that our software build systems have evolved to support multiple init systems, its largely a moot point.
digi_owl 10y ago
No, it does not need to be proprietary. Instead one need to have control over the commit rights of core repositories. As for conflicting: i think you have missed server years of conflict, never mind that you can only ever have one process as pid1 on a unix setup. And if something like your session tracker depends on pid1 being systemd, you get conflict.